Disqus - Latest Comments for giltotherescue

Re: Dashboard updates: Activity Stream A/B Testing and more

giltotherescue — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:41:39 -0000

It looks like the problem is that you have such a busy stream! We provide access to the 200 most recent points events, but that only covers a day or two for you. Shortly we'll be expanding it to up to 500 points events in your history. Hope this helps.

Re: Dashboard updates: Activity Stream A/B Testing and more

giltotherescue — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:37:54 -0000

We're releasing a fix shortly for the date problem on sales.

Disqus login problem looks like a bug. We're on it!

Re: Dashboard updates: Activity Stream A/B Testing and more

giltotherescue — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:21:03 -0000

Sounds like a bug. You should not be seeing only one day's worth of points history. We'll look into it right away.

Re: Dashboard updates: Activity Stream A/B Testing and more

giltotherescue — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:19:53 -0000

Would it be helpful if the links opened in a new tab/window? That way you wouldn't lose your place in the stream.

Re: Dashboard updates: Activity Stream A/B Testing and more

giltotherescue — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:18:37 -0000

#1: That's strange. I noticed it too. Will take a look to see why it's blocking links from opening in a new window.

#2: I noticed this also. We're tuning down the frequency of poll vote notifications.

Re: Dashboard updates: Activity Stream A/B Testing and more

giltotherescue — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:16:41 -0000

At the top of your Lenses page there should be a little "Make this my main page" link which will default you to the Lenses page instead of the Activity page. Here's what it looks like: http://cl.ly/1C2P2U100G2M1K.... This preference is automatically set for Giant Squids.

Re: Dashboard updates: Activity Stream A/B Testing and more

giltotherescue — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:24:19 -0000

Thanks for your feedback Jim.

We have made a change to the number of points notifications available on the Activity page, but the change was to raise the maximum from 100 to 200 (it is not based on an arbitrary date range like 24 hours). When you first view the page, we show you the 20 most recent, and by clicking See More you can see 20 more at a time all the way to 200. This update does add HQ and Quests into the mix, but it does not in any way hide your points history.

Re: Dashboard updates: Activity Stream A/B Testing and more

giltotherescue — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:15:41 -0000

Currently activity streams are private, so this might be tricky to implement due to authentication. That being said, I can see how it would be useful, and we will keep this in mind for the future.

Re: From Tesla Motors to the “Patriot Hack” - Martin Eberhard on Protecting Your Privacy Online

giltotherescue — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 08:56:50 -0000

Hey Tim,

It's true that privacy is a major concern. Things like FICA, DMCA, cameras everywhere I look, scare the crap out of me. It's impossible to go totally off the grid now.

However, looking at this from a content provider's perspective, allowing Google to serve me advertising based on my interests isn't such a bad thing. On occasion I *do* find ads helpful.

As someone who strongly advocates using Adwords, what kind of effect do you think it would have on product marketing, and the economy in general, if Haystack were enabled on every PC and search patterns became untraceable?

I'll bet that you happily use Google Search, Gmail, and other G products as well. Keep in mind those tools are free only because Google is able to achieve some level of precision matching advertisers to buyers. Haystack would take that away.

The fact that we don't have new laws in place to protect the privacy of search data to some degree (legal cases, for example) is appalling. "The Constitution doesn't protect it" is a ludicrous argument, because there's no way the Founding Fathers could have predicted this great of an advance in technology. Ironically, the same Supreme Court judges who argue against privacy protection use this same argument ("there's no way they could have known...") as a sound argument for all sorts of other infringing legislation (gun control is a recent example).

The renegade approach described in this article will certainly do a decent job of protecting your own privacy, but if everyone used it we'd be screwed. The author was right...this is indeed a hack, not a long term solution.

Here's an interesting thought: what if the hack worked so well that the ad brokers had no choice but to lobby as hard as they could for privacy legislation, so that at least some of their users would feel safe disabling the hack...making search data relevant again?

Re: Phasing Out VigeWeekly

giltotherescue — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:15:33 -0000

I've found interesting stories on all of your blogs, but not all of the posts apply to me. I preferred a weekly recap as opposed to subscribing to all four (which is what I plan to do now). But go with your instincts -- I'm probably just an edge case.

Re: Ten Ways to Avoid WordPress Crackery

giltotherescue — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:59:18 -0000

Great tips. I've always wondered, though, why Wordpress makes it so hard to upgrade. Why do I have to download the new source and FTP the files every time a new version is released (which, lately, seems to be every week or two)?

Have you seen a tool to automatically backup the old WP files and perform an upgrade without having to run through the whole processs?

Re: Scoop: Job Cuts at PHP Startup Zend Could Be Aimed With An Eye Towards a Sale

giltotherescue — Tue, 20 May 2008 00:07:04 -0000

If anyone buys Zend, it's going to be Sun. With their Platform product's Java Bridge integration and the new Studio IDE built on top of Eclipse, they sure are snuggling up.

Re: Twitter-storm: Blaine leaves, blame flies

giltotherescue — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:53:48 -0000

although i'd like to stick up for another architect, twitter is a really simple web service. it succeeded because it's a great idea, not because of brilliant engineering.

the reasons for twitter's scaling problems are irrelevant. an architect's main job responsibility is to design a solid, stable infrastructure, and i don't have a problem holding him accountable for a failure in that department.

all that said, there's no reason this should be such a loud conversation. i haven't read the arrington post referenced above and don't plan on it.

Re: Why Google App Engine Matters

giltotherescue — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 08:54:19 -0000

You make a good point about non-relational data stores. I have yet to work on a project where such a data store would make sense, but I'm sure there are plenty of applications (like indexing web pages) where BigTable or CouchDB are a perfect fit, but which are simply beyond the scope of my limited experience.

I find ease of deployment a much more compelling reason to use App Engine than Google's Users API. OpenID, among others, are set out to solve this same problem, but it just doesn't seem that urgent. Personally, I don't mind juggling logins for each site I visit (but I'm also a privacy nut, so there you go).

The problem is, in the context of my day to day work, I just can't imagine why I would choose App Engine for any of my projects. Still, I'm keeping a close eye on the App Gallery - maybe it'll give me some ideas.

Thanks for the reply.

Re: Why Google App Engine Matters

giltotherescue — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 16:16:04 -0000

Hey Clinton,
While I agree that AppEngine is likely to provoke creativity, unfortunately most of that will have to be focused around the limitations in the platform itself--not in new applications for the technology. That might serve to Google's advantage, but I'd rather see all that energy focused on enhancing existing platforms rather than building an all new one.
Unless the tools get a whole lot better, designing an infinitely scalable application doesn't make sense for a new project. And it's probably easier to port an existing application with scalability requirements to Amazon, rather than rewriting it from scratch on AppEngine. So for now I'd rather not invest too much energy into exploring it.
I also disagree that there hasn't been much innovation in database design lately. MySQL Proxy, a relatively simple way to implement sharding (also a newish concept), is just one example. Some of the largest web sites in the world (take Facebook and Flickr for example) have figured out how to scale brilliantly on open source database technology. How is that not innovation?

Re: Git with remotes and SVN

giltotherescue — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:26:55 -0000

Curious...what is it that you like so much about Git? How does it fit into your development process?
I have yet to play with it..

Re: VigeWeekly: From Scrabulous to Gems

giltotherescue — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:22:53 -0000

I love the new blog format, and the design is amazing, but I'd prefer to have the option of reading the entire post in my feed reader.

Also, there seems to be some kind of bug that makes the URL "http://www.viget.com/about/..." appear as the default when posting a comment.

Just FYI

Re: Size Does Matter — Bigger Monitors Save 2.5 Hours a Day

giltotherescue — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 14:06:02 -0000

I'm a software engineer and usually need 10 or more windows open for all of my tools. Having that many tools readily accessible is not particularly unusual in most industries.

I use 2 x 19" monitors and that seems to work pretty well. I also have a program called Synergy that allows me to share my keyboard and mouse between my Mac and PC, which sit next to each other.

I also have a laptop, and when I'm on the road there is only one thing that keeps me productive: the new Mac Spaces feature (http://www.apple.com/macosx.... The trick is to organize your applications into groups based on what you do with them. You can even assign certain applications to ALWAYS open in a certain space. It takes a few days getting comfortable with using your keyboard to switch between spaces, but it's a huge time saver.

Re: All New Viget.com and Blogging Strategy

giltotherescue — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:20:23 -0000

I enjoyed all the blogs, so I'll probably stick to this feed and check out the digests.

I love the new design.

Re: The Problem with Scaffolding

giltotherescue — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:18:52 -0000

Good point. One of the things I've felt wary about with Rails is that it's so opinionated about what's right that developers learning Ruby/Rails as their first language might miss out on clear examples of tradeoffs and bad practices.

Re: Awesome hosting options

giltotherescue — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 11:11:46 -0000

I'd also add logicworks.net to the list. From a budget perspective they don't start making sense until you need multiple layers of redundancy and failover, but at that point they are cheaper than RS. They also offer a managed mysql replication system which is just too cool for words.

Re: The Mosso Cloud: Requests are not a good metric

giltotherescue — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:14:48 -0000

I hadn't heard of the new pricing plan until you mentioned it. That actually makes...let's see...absolutely no sense. Want to bet they also turned off client side caching headers for static files so that more "requests" are made?

Re: Putting the blame on your vendors for the win.

giltotherescue — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 11:39:47 -0000

The 37signals thing bummed me out. They delicately phrased their communication so that it sounded like they were taking the blame, but when you read it closely, they are actually blaming Rackspace for taking 2 hours to replace a failed piece of hardware. The fact is that hardware does fail, and you can't reasonably expect them to replace it much faster than that.

The transformer thing was a totally separate issue, and it sounds like Rackspace hadn't been keeping up with their backup systems to make sure they were working properly. Hopefully they learned their lesson, and I won't discredit them unless it happens again.

I've had my own frustrations with Rackspace, but after the fact they've always gone out of their way to fix the problem. I still refer people to them on a regular basis, and will continue to do so in spite of the 37s/tumblr nonsense.

Re: Casual Cooking Club Dinner #1

giltotherescue — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 20:38:47 -0000

Damn! Why'd you have to wait until SF to start this? Sounds fun.

Re: People Do Change

giltotherescue — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 08:14:06 -0000

There is a big difference between "people don't change" and "you can't change other people". From my experience, the latter is impossible.